Instant coffee products including blends of coffee and dairy are commonly provided in one of three forms: a dry powdered mix, a ready-to-drink beverage (RTD), or a concentrated liquid. When blending coffee and dairy ingredients in a single product, however, the instability of these two components can pose difficulties in forming an organoleptically pleasing shelf stable product. Each particular form of the product has shortcomings that either render them challenging to manufacture in a stable form or result in a final beverage less than organoleptically desirable from a consumer standpoint.
Dry powdered mixes with both dry coffee solids and dried creamers are available under various brand names. These powdered mixes are reconstituted into a beverage by adding an appropriate amount of a liquid to form a coffee plus dairy beverage drink. Dry powdered mixes, however, are generally not well accepted by some consumers because they have a lower perception of freshness due to the use of dried creamers. Powdered mixes can also have poor solubility in water, particularly in cold water, which results in a limited amount of coffee solids or dry creamer that can be provided in the mix. A high amount of coffee solids often results in an increased acidity to the resulting beverage, which may cause flocculation or dairy particles dropping out of solution upon reconstitution.
RTD coffee plus dairy beverages are also commercially available, but due to the mass and volume of water in each serving, these beverages can be bulky and not easily portable. Moreover, it is also common to include high amounts of buffering salts (for example, sodium and potassium phosphates, citrates, and the like) or bulking agents (for example, sugars, salts, gums, and the like) in the RTD beverage to increase the heat stability and minimize feathering (such as transient feather-like forms on the surface of the beverage) of the dairy ingredients during beverage manufacture. Such amounts of additional ingredients, including flavorings, are often added to RTD drink formulations in order to deliver a product that remains stable. However, these RTD beverages are not always viewed as authentic coffee beverages due to their organoleptic character.
Concentrated liquids are another option to provide an instant coffee plus dairy beverage. In this form, the coffee and dairy ingredients are provided in a concentrated liquid that is diluted or reconstituted by the consumer to the desired final beverage. Prior coffee plus dairy liquid concentrates can also have stability problems that result in gelation and/or protein agglomeration during sterilization or during an extended shelf life. Additionally, the presence of high levels of lactose can result in Maillard reactions that may cause browning. As a result, it is common, in some cases, to find dairy plus coffee concentrates limiting the amount of dairy and/or coffee solids in the concentrate to minimize these problems, or the manufacturer simply warns the consumer that the concentrate only has a limited shelf life, such as three months or less.
Prior liquid dairy plus coffee concentrates commonly utilize cream, whole milk, or skim milk in either a condensed or evaporated form as the dairy ingredient. The use of condensed or evaporated milk in the prior concentrates also has shortcomings. Condensed or evaporated dairy products are simply a concentrated form of the starting dairy milk and, therefore, include all of the components in the same relative amounts as the starting dairy milk. Condensed or evaporated milk, therefore, includes large amounts of lactose and various dairy minerals. As discussed above, lactose and minerals can form instabilities in dairy concentrates. In addition, the condensing and evaporating process is also known to produce undesired organoleptic notes, such as a cooked milk flavor.
As mentioned above, with the prior condensed or evaporated dairy ingredients, a large portion of the dairy solids includes lactose and other minerals in the same ratio as in the starting dairy milk source. For example, prior concentrates using evaporated or condensed milk typically have about 26 percent protein based on the weight of the total dairy solids and about 40 percent lactose based on the weight of the total dairy solids. If high levels of dairy proteins are desired in a concentrate using evaporated or condensed milk, the concentrated dairy component also provides corresponding high levels of lactose and minerals (because condensed and evaporated milk have these ingredients in the same relative amount as the milk source), which, as discussed above, can cause instability problems in the concentrate.
Attempts to improve the stability of coffee plus dairy concentrates using condensed or evaporated milk have included incorporation of additional components into the concentrate. In some cases, glycerine, mono- and diglycerides, carrageenin, pectin, or coffee aroma ingredients have been added to the concentrate in an attempt to help stabilize the dairy plus coffee product. However, the use of large amounts of these additives provides complexity to the manufacturing process, additional expense to the formula, and can result in unexpected organoleptic characteristics and textures in the resulting beverage. In other cases, the coffee solids and dairy components may be sold as separate packets that are later combined by the user. However, such component separation necessitates the packaging and sale of two individual components that the consumer must mix together.
In order to minimize the bulk and weight of the concentrate, it is often desired to provide a high level of concentration by increasing the level of solids in the product. However, simply increasing the coffee and/or dairy solids of existing formulations not only encounters the organoleptic and manufacturing issues discussed above, but also typically forms a gel-like or pudding consistency of the final product. This texture is not well accepted by consumers in a beverage product because they are expecting a pourable liquid.
Accordingly, prior formulations of coffee and dairy concentrates are generally limited in the amount of dairy protein and/or the amount of coffee solids that can be formed into a stable and fluid concentrate. For example, prior dairy plus coffee concentrates are generally limited to about 15 percent or less coffee solids, but also less than about 28 percent non-fat milk solids. However, since prior concentrates rely on the use of evaporated or condensed milk (which have dairy proteins, lactose, and minerals in the same relative percentages as the starting milk source), these concentrates are also limited in the amount of dairy protein that can be included in a shelf stable and fluid concentrated beverage generally due to the undesirably high levels of lactose in these beverages. For instance, as non-fat milk solids is generally about 37 percent protein, 54 percent lactose, and 8 percent other minerals, these prior concentrates are generally limited to a formulation having about 10 percent or less dairy protein, contain about 15 percent lactose, and up to about 3 percent other minerals at the same time. In other words, prior concentrates are about 37 percent protein relative to the non-fat milk solids components and about 54 percent lactose relative to the non-fat milk solids components. As discussed above, these levels of lactose and minerals can result in undesired problems in highly concentrated products, or require additional unwanted ingredients for stability.